Nay, but it is serious! the King is gone, and the Duke with him.  The’ latter actually to the army.  They must sow laurels, if they design to reap any; for there are no conquests forward enough for them to come just in time and finish.  The French have relieved Egra and cut to pieces two of the best Austrian regiments, the cuirassiers.  This is ugly!  We are sure, you know, of beating the French afterwards in France and Flanders; but I don’t hear that the heralds have produced any precedents for our conquering them on the other side the Rhine.(802) We at home may be excused from trembling at the arrival of every post; I am sure I shall.  If I were a woman, should support my fears with more dignity; for if one did lose a husband or a lover, there are those becoming comforts, weeds and cypresses, jointures and weeping cupids; but I have only a friend or two to lose, and there are no ornamental substitutes settled, to be one’s proxy for that sort of grief.  One has not the satisfaction of fixing a day for receiving visits of consolation from a thousand people whom one don’t love, because one has lost the only person one did love.  This is a new situation, and I don’t like it.

You will see the Regency in the newspapers.  I think the Prince might have been of it when my Lord Gower is.  I don’t think the latter more Jacobite than his Royal Highness.

The Prince is to come to town every Sunday fortnight to hold drawing-rooms; the Princesses stay all the summer at St. James’s-would I did! but I go in three weeks to Norfolk; the only place that could make me wish to live at St. James’s.  My Lord has pressed me so much, that I could not with decency refuse:  he is going to furnish and hang his picture-gallery, and wants me.  I can’t help wishing that I had never known a Guido from a Teniers:  but who could ever suspect any connexion between painting and the wilds of Norfolk.

Princess Louisa’s contract with the Prince of Denmark was signed the morning before the King Went; but I don’t hear when she goes.  Poor Caroline misses her man of Lubeck,(803) by his missing the crown of Sweden.

I must tell you an odd thing that happened yesterday at Leicester House.  The Prince’s children were in the circle:  Lady Augusta(804) heard somebody call Sir Robert Rich by his name.  She concluded there was but one Sir Robert in the world, and taking him for Lord Orford, the child went staring up to him, and said, “Pray, where is your blue string! and pray what has become of your fat belly?” Did one ever hear of a more royal education, than to have rung this mob cant in the child’s ears till it had made this impression on her!